Before the Smithsonian, the Field,
the abundance of natural history framed,
there were, what they called,
cabinets of curiosity. The rich
gathered seashells and fossilized
oak leaves and other pretty things
they had eyes but no names for.
In mine, I would keep an olive tree
from Palestine, and the skeleton
of a dodo bird, and perhaps soil of
sea-ridden Miami. Tell the spectators that
no, perhaps it wasn’t
curiosity so much as desperation
that curated my cabinet, a plea
for them to avenge the children under the rubble,
the forgotten species and the buried earth,
that behind the glass is an infinity
of nameless bodies.
—
Farrah is a Bengali-American Ph.D. student. She is passionate about climate justice, poetry, and their intersection.
